


A Lucky Man

by DecoySocktopus



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Do Not Archive, Horror, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Nonconathon Treat, Other, Spiders, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-01 17:12:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15147938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DecoySocktopus/pseuds/DecoySocktopus
Summary: Martin has always liked spiders.





	A Lucky Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nonconamod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonconamod/gifts).



The book starts with a blank room in a simple house, empty of furnishings, the walls off-white and undecorated aside from two doors and a monochrome painting on the right. This painting shows an eye, the pupil overly large, the iris little more than a suggestion. It seems to follow the reader, however they tilt the book. A blot on an otherwise pristine wall, its very presence an ugly imposition.

In the centre of the room stands the spider.

Its back is an upside down teardrop, black and tapered like a gentleman’s coattails. And although the illustration is simplistic, unsophisticated, the spider can be seen to loom above the doors, its shadow an inky pool beneath its various legs. The face, the mouthparts, the infamous eyes are turned away. It watches the door on the left. On its head, a red top hat, splashed across the paper like a paintbrush smear of blood.

On the page, the words ‘KNOCK KNOCK’ appear in a childlike hand, uneven letters splaying in black ink.

Mr. Spider’s legs twitch and jump across the page. Frantic, like a drowning swimmer. Gripping at the air, pulling and twisting, weaving colourless strands on a blank white page.

The text changes. ‘WHO IS IT, MR. SPIDER?’

*

_These days, the monster is known as ‘Mr. Spider’._

_It doesn’t mind. Here in its sticky, strand-strewn household, it doesn’t really need a name to be known. Its children never forget what they came from. But prey have such odd memories; they need names in which to sow their terrors, like plants in dirt._

_Mr. Spider doesn’t mind its newest name. Names change, but fear remains. And it has been feared for a very long time. A primordial terror, a memory of screams, passed down through generations like a family trait._

_The prey have always feared spiders. That is how the world should be._

*

The book starts with a blank room, two doors, a painting and the spider. In its picture frame, the eye is restless; it roves the empty room. It watches the doors. It watches the spider.

‘KNOCK KNOCK’ says a cluster of uneven letters above the leftmost door. Mr. Spider stills its relentless twitches.

‘WHO IS IT, MR. SPIDER?’ The spider turns to the door, revealing an uncomfortable profile; its abdomen is sunken, shrunk with malnourishment. It leans its teardrop body towards the door and rubs its pedipalps together.

‘IT’S MR. CRANE,’ the text reads. ‘AND HE’S BROUGHT YOU A BOOK.’ The left-hand door opens stickily, smearing something brown across the ground beneath. In the doorway stands a tall, thin fly, with spindly legs and an overstretched body. It clutches a book in front of its chest. Mr. Spider opens his legs wide, proffers an embrace, though it is difficult to tell if it is welcoming the fly or the book.

On one solitary, easily overlooked page, the image changes. The crane fly shifts, becomes a gangly young man of around eighteen years. He is tall with long arms and legs, adolescent-thin, not yet done growing. His clothes are too big, with tatty hems. He screams as the spider bends to embrace him.

And in the background over his shoulder stands a boy, perhaps a decade younger, wearing glasses and an expression of great concentration. He makes no move to help, or to run. He stands against a blank background and watches.

On the wall of the house, the painted eye spasms. It turns to look at the boy.

And then the door swings closed.

*

_‘Elias Bouchard’ is calling in favours._

_That’s another unneeded name. The watcher that hunkers behind a desk at the Institute and spreads its parasitic eyes like webbing; like the spiders, it doesn’t need a name. It’s a leech and a collector, a connoisseur of screams. A different kind of hunter. Naming it is meaningless._

_But favours are favours, and Mr. Spider keeps its ledgers as clean as its home; it resents the unfulfilled obligations and unavenged slights like scraps of dirt, like old husks fouling its web. It appreciates the chance to do a bit of spring cleaning. And this particular favour is large and lingering, clinging for some fifty years or more. Mr. Spider doesn’t like that._

_It agrees to the watcher’s request._

*

The book starts with a blank room, a painting, the spider and an open door. On the doorstep stands a man.

His hands are clasped in front of him, and his eyes are wide and worried. He has an abundance of freckles, and takes up more space than he seems comfortable with. His fear makes him look younger than he is. The spider rubs its pedipalps like hands.

‘IT’S MARTIN BLACKWOOD,’ announces the childish text. ‘HE’S COME FROM THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE. HE’S BROUGHT YOU A REQUEST.’ The young man’s hands move; he’s gripping a sheet of paper covered in tiny, handwritten text. Some of it is visible: a date, a name, an address in Chelsea. A greeting. The words, ‘as we discussed, Martin will provide the necessary vessel-’. Covered by the young man’s sweaty hands, the rest of the text is illegible.

Mr. Spider steps aside and lets the young man in.

*

_The Institute is under attack again. Not for the first time; every stronghold is a beacon for invaders and rivals, for wasps who want to feed on the young. Mr. Spider has fought off attackers, though not for some years. Its turn will come again. But for now, the Institute is at risk, and Elias Bouchard is calling in favours to protect it. He wants defences, webbing to strengthen his walls and suicide troops to crouch between his acolytes and the swarm._

_Martin Blackwood is frightened. He stands in the empty room and stammers. He stutters that he doesn’t mind spiders, that he actually rather likes the large, fluffy ones (his eyes wide and darting across the black bristles that coat Mr. Spider’s abdomen like pelt), that he never knew there were spiders as large as this one, and what does it eat?_

_The most obvious answer occurs to him, and his mouth opens to whimper. Mr. Spider bends. It brings its eight bright eyes down to Martin’s face, its mouthparts working. It touches his untidy hair and soft freckled cheeks with its pedipalps. It touches the strands of webbing that encircle them both, vibrating the silk like a stringed instrument, playing hypnotic patterns. It touches his mind with its own._

_MR. SPIDER LIKES A QUIET HOUSE._

_Martin is immediately silent. His eyes glaze over, blinking reflexively as several tears drip unnoticed down his cheeks._

_Silence is better. Whimpers and pleading are untidy; they foul the web. And in silence, Martin obediently strips off his clothes, folding them in a tidy pile next to the door. His face is blank of expression; his eyes are empty of anything. His mind, though. His mind is busy. It batters at the webbing around it, tearing ineffectually as strands ensnare him, encouraging his body to stretch out on the bare floor._

_Inside his gently cocooned mind, Martin is baffled. He doesn’t understand; he was sent to an address without instructions, he was not warned, he was not asked. He thinks that he is being punished, and doesn’t know why. He thinks that, whatever he did to deserve this, it must have been truly unforgivable. He worries about the research he left unfinished on his desk, which the Archivist demanded by the end of the day, and which will now be late._

_He stares out through eyes that don’t belong to him anymore, and tells himself that he likes spiders. He repeats it like a mantra, like a prayer, as if he can change his reality through the simple force of his liking._

_He can’t, of course. But the thought is sweet, and Mr. Spider pats him fondly on the head._

_It sits itself back onto its legs, abdomen extended, flexing convulsively. It starts to spin ten tiny cocoons._

*

The book starts with a blank room, two closed doors, a painting of an eye, Martin and the spider. The eye is tilted, straining at the seams of its picture frame to watch what is happening in the empty room. Martin is smiling, or close to it; his lips are pulled up and aside, an unconvincing rictus that doesn’t change from page to page.

Mr. Spider is weaving. It pulls and plucks at strands of webbing, sculpting and kneading the silk like dough. It rolls out little balls. It pinches each at one end, forming pendant shapes, like rain drops, or tears. Tiny things, each a bit shorter than a human index finger. They glisten, wet and somewhat translucent, draped delicately over one of the spider’s legs like a white cloth over a waiter’s arm. Inside each one is a coiled shadow.

‘MR. SPIDER PAYS HIS DEBTS’, announce the uneven letters. There’s an odd shimmer to them, a rainbow tint reflected in the little web cocoons. ‘HE’S GOING TO GIVE YOU A PRESENT.’

Martin’s smile doesn’t change as the spider looms over him. Its mouthparts twitch and drool a colourless substance that it smears across one of its frontmost limbs. From the other, the ten pendant-shaped cocoons hang waiting. The shadows inside have too many legs.

In the painting on the wall, the eye is watching. It stares at Martin’s overstretched smile as he obediently bends his knees and spreads his legs apart. The spider rests its twitching, dripping forelimb between them. Its starts to push.

Page by page, the act unfolds in loving, sketchy detail. The spider crouches, one long limb slipping up and into Martin’s body, deeper by the page. His smile never falters. Lines appear across his abdomen, suggesting movement under the skin. A slicing, a pushing, a slick and spongy shifting. A rearrangement beneath his ribcage. But this must surely just be a trick of the illustrator; he doesn’t bleed, and he doesn’t scream, though the spider’s limb moves in, in, in.

And then it withdraws, leaving an opening perceptibly wider than it was to begin with. Delicately, the spider plucks one of the shimmering cocoons from their waiting row. Gripping gently, it begins to slide its forelimb back into Martin’s body.

He smiles. But even so, there is just the slightest suggestion of movement around the lines of his body. A tremble. He shakes as the spider’s limb disappears deep between his legs.

There are ten cocoons in all. One by one, they are delicately pushed up and into Martin’s heat, into new hollows and stretched out spaces between his organs. They are hung from his ribs like Christmas ornaments; the artist depicts these resting places as little bulges under Martin’s skin, that shift and turn and eventually settle into smoothness. Afterwards, there is no sign that they ever existed.

Finally, the spider withdraws its forelimb, slick with its drool and a few clinging strands of web. It slides free with a little ‘POP’, portrayed in tiny pink-tinged letters. Its absence leaves Martin stretched open, dripping, smiling through his shock.

Satisfied, the spider rubs its forelimbs together to clean them.

‘LOOK AFTER MR. SPIDER’S PRESENT’, say the letters. They droop on the page; their ink is smeared, watered down and faint to the eye. There is a sticky sheen to their shadows. And, on the next page, they say, ‘IF THERE ARE MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED, MR. SPIDER’S PRESENT WILL SCARE THEM AWAY.’

On the page, Mr. Spider turns its head to the painting on the wall; the eye inside looks back. There is perhaps some message exchanged, some primitive communication formed in blinks and the vibrating strands of web. The book does not provide a translation. Mr. Spider bows its head.

In the background, Martin is putting his clothes back on. He is still smiling.

‘MR. SPIDER ENJOYED YOUR VISIT,’ says the text. It’s almost too faint to read, hovering in a jumble above Martin’s head. As he opens the door to leave, it shrinks, the letters huddling against each other, the lines a shaky tremble.

‘MR. SPIDER SAYS, ‘KEEP THEM WARM’.’

*

_Martin will forget; this is part of Elias Bouchard’s request, and Mr. Spider has only ever fulfilled its obligations to the letter. Martin will not remember, except perhaps in dreams, and that can’t be helped. Dreams are not the usual hunting grounds of spiders._

_Sometimes, there might be a…shift. A twitch, a flicker, a flutter of legs. An ungainly pulse under the skin, the careless kick of a slumbering weapon. No doubt the vessel will notice. He will inspect himself in the mirror. He will poke and prod. He might go so far as to consult a doctor. But he will not know what he is looking for, or exactly how to find it, and eventually he will convince himself that the spasms are natural, that he has always suffered them._

_If he’s very lucky, he will never learn the truth._

_If the Institute remains untouched, and the Hive does not return, and the dancers choose a different stage, and the darkness does not envelop, and the laughing liar takes its obsession elsewhere, and the consuming flames are extinguished on those old stone walls..._

_If all of these unlikely events occur in tandem, then Martin Blackwood will tell himself that he suffers muscle spasms, and it will be true. He will never learn otherwise. The sentinels will slumber until his dead and decaying body eventually uncovers their eggs inside his abdomen, and then they will eat themselves free and come home. If he is lucky, they will wait until he dies before they start eating. They won’t need to start any sooner._

_But Martin Blackwood does not seem like a lucky man._

**Author's Note:**

> Brought to you by me completely misreading a request, getting hopelessly caught up in an overdose of arachnid enthusiasm, and then discovering too late that I'd written the wrong thing entirely. So, uh. Spiders, anyone?


End file.
